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Like a lot of people, I enjoy Lewis Black’s comedy on The Daily Show to the point where I told TiVo to keep an eye out for his standup routine. Having seen the latter, I can say that most of this book is essentially “Lewis Black’s Standup Comedy: The Book.” Black often goes off on random invectives against whatever comes to mind, like the chapters he spent complaining about candy corn or cell phones.
Non sequiters like those aside, though, there’s this kind of loose narative running through most of the book talking about growing up in the 60s and how Black developed his short-tempered views on authority in general. These parts are more like “Lewis Black’s Standup Comedy: The Blog” in that they’re pretty disjointed and hop around in time and space with pretty much complete impunity.
Black’s comedy here is pretty raunchy at times (e.g., he describes deficating on the television when it told him that Nixon had won re-election), but every now again he’ll inject it with some witty, more cerebral remark that makes you think for a second. For example, he quips that “if the United States Postal Service hadn’t already existed, Kafka would have created it.” The book doesn’t have as many laughs per minute as his “Back in Black” segments on The Daily Show, but I did get quite a few good gufaws out of it overall.
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